Wednesday, September 7, 2011

"Goodnight, Grandma" by Rachel Deering - Horror flash fiction

Grandma used to come to me in the night. When all the lights were out and the pale glow of the moon broke through the trees and fell across my bedroom floor, she would slink out of the shadows and perch on the foot of my bed. She appeared to me, in those late hours, as a twisted wisp of darkness. An extension of the silhouetted trees, she would mimic their movement, dancing and swaying to the howl of the wind. She died many years before I was born, so I had no way of knowing what she really looked like. The only feature that stood out in all that amorphous black was the faint and raspy whimper of her voice. Oh, it was such a pitiful sound.

She used to tell me stories about what it was like to be dead. She would cry when she spoke of how she could never again see the sun, and how living in the cold and dark had bled all the color from her skin. I think she was ashamed of her appearance, and that's why she stayed hidden in the shadows. At the end of her visits, she always asked for a kiss. She would tell me to close my eyes, and then she would move over to me and press the cold flesh of her lips against mine. I remember how she always took a deep breath during our kiss. The air creeping up out of my throat would tickle, and I'd cough a little bit. By the time I opened my eyes, she was gone.

I moved away from the house where grandma lived when I was 8 years old. I hear a new family moved in, with a little girl even younger than me. I hope she's nice to my dear old grandma.